It may be unkind to question the wisdom of the Nobel committee for awarding this year’s peace prize to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for ending half a century of fighting with his country’s rebels with a peace deal he painstakingly negotiated over four years.
For the peace settlement has been unexpectedly dealt a serious blow when it was rejected by the slimmest of margins in a public referendum. Santos deserves the blame for putting his peace deal in jeopardy now when he had no real need to call the vote in the first place.
Forging the peace has been difficult enough under the best of circumstances without subjecting it to the vagaries of popular emotions which, given the brutality of the war over such a long period, understandably run fairly deep in the public consciousness.
It, of course, did not help at all that Santos’ own predecessor, Avaro Uribe (whose father died at the hands of the rebels), led the campaign against the peace deal. Winning the peace and winning popular support for it are two different things and — as the Colombian example shows — potentially diametrically opposing propositions.
In the light of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the Trump electoral phenomenon in the United States and now the Colombian peace debacle, it appears no longer safe anywhere to bet on the collective wisdom of voters. What happens in Colombia may be a world away from us but it still matters in our own region and for Malaysia. This is because we are directly involved in helping to forge a peace pact with the Moro rebels and the government in the Philippines.
It is a process that has already consumed more than a decade longer than the Colombian one and with no final conclusion yet in sight. Most troubling, perhaps, is the fact that any peace deal in the Philippines — already having experienced two false dawns — will similarly have to be submitted for a nationwide referendum towards the end.
Given how Philippine politicians — reading and occasionally exploiting popular sentiments — have been effective so far in their efforts to stymie their successive governments’ peace-making endeavours, the probability of any eventual peace deal winning over voters in a referendum is not altogether encouraging. Whither then peace between the Moros and the Philippine government?
Fortunately, there is every prospect that under President Rodrigo Duterte, an altogether different paradigm may be emerging. One of the most far-reaching and ambitious of the new president’s promises is to turn his country into a federal state under his watch. That is an admittedly tall order even for an action-oriented leader that Duterte has shown himself to be.
But on closer scrutiny, Duterte’s federal plan, which he is convinced is the realistic answer to fulfilling the Moros’ long-held aspirations for a fully autonomous homeland, makes great sense. There is a far greater chance that Filipinos in general will accept the general concept of regional political devolution if they all enjoy the same rights to such a concept instead of only the Moros of Mindanao exclusively enjoying such a privilege.
A federal Philippines with various regions — including a Moro one — enjoying political autonomy and decentralisation of power from Manila is a sound idea. It should have far greater prospect of passing muster in a constitutional revamp and gaining popular approval thereafter.
The only drawback of such a plan may be that after fighting long, hard, furious and bloody in the battlefield and off it for their own autonomous homeland, the Moros are again being asked to be more patient and to be generous in agreeing to their aspirations becoming the aspirations of all Filipinos.
Having being denied their legitimate political rights over centuries, the Moros should be able to be a bit more patient and to be even generous if called upon to.
Political circumstances under the first Philippine president from Mindanao may be particularly propitious. Still, Duterte is operating under the same set of political circumstances that have tripped up the last two of his predecessors in their quest for peace.
The Colombian referendum result points to a potentially insurmountable final hurdle if the Moro peace agreements forged under President Benigno Aquino were to be submitted for popular approval as they are. The Colombians are now left without a Plan B for peace.
Filipinos — Moros and non-Moros alike — will have to draw useful lessons from that experience. Duterte’s federal idea may be just that Plan B. It may even be the only real peace chance.
John Teo is a Kuching-based journalist